Policy management is the application of abstract policies to control the services provided by a network switch. Policy is the association of conditions and actions, based on the attributes of the switch, that enforce certain behaviors in the switch, resulting in a specific service.
Because of the complexity and ranges of values for switching attributes to enforce specific services, the switching attributes need to be organized in a form that can be effectively supported on the network elements involved in the delivery of the services. Although network management system (NMS) solutions exist in the prior art which could be used for policy management, these solutions are undesirable because they generally map their concept of a network into statistically constructed virtual information stores, referred to as managed information bases (MIB). This mapping is often accomplished either through translators that translate an input of some modeling language such as, for example, ASN.1 (Abstract Syntax Notation One), or by hand coding all statistically typed model elements, data, and behavior.
Existing network management architectures therefore do not employ dynamic loading of element definitions and runtime interrogation of types, nor do they generally use descriptive meta-data information to elicit specific behaviors and configuration of network modeling based on typing information. Furthermore, current architectures usually bind network management to typing the entire framework with respect to protocol, allowing the framework and model to represent, for example, ATM but not IP, carrier voice but not data, and IP/ATM enterprise but not carrier ATM/frame relay.
Accordingly, there is a need for a network management framework that provides a meta-model for expressing a network and relationships between entities in the model in a dynamic matter. The network management framework should allow data representations and behavior, topology relationships, and application services including policy management services, to be dynamically assembled into a manageable model of a network without restrictions as to typing, size, growth, and/or performance.